Videocasts Posts

Control and update dozens of styles by changing only one or two. This episode demonstrates my method for creating master paragraph and character styles that allow for layout-wide changes quickly and easily.
This episode is available in both the standard 672 x 450 format, as well as an iPod-compatible version.

A subscriber who watched Episode 23 (Practicing Safe Output) was trying to follow my advice by moving objects with transparency to lower layers to avoid rasterization issues. But he was experiencing unwanted text wrap changes. He e-mailed me saying:
Moving text to another layer above the Default layer overrides the text wrap applied to the [...]

I got an e-mail question from someone who said: I’m having trouble with the type on a path thing, trying to get the type to go on a circle. When I do the bottom part of the circle it makes the type upside down. Is there a quick fix?
InDesign considers the path a single line, [...]

Designers have very strong opinions about type…so I’m anticipating a lot of questions, and perhaps complaints, about my justification choices in Episode 25…particulary concerning Glyph Scaling. Purists may say that this should never be done, but I would argue that doing it only as much as I did in this episode is definitely an option [...]

If you’re only using tracking to control the look of your type at the paragraph level — like I will confess to doing in the past — you’re missing out on features that give you far greater control of your type and make for much better-looking paragraphs. This episode covers Justification, Hyphenation, Glyph Scaling, Optical [...]

I usually stick to things that can be done automatically within InDesign, but every now and then, you can’t avoid the fact that some things just haven’t made it into the product yet. In this episode, I demonstrate two methods for getting a solid-to-transparent gradient into your layout. It should be a lot more simple [...]

Within hours of posting the long-overdue Episode 23, I finally started catching up on other things — including the second half of the latest episode of David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion’s InDesign Secrets podcast, which I had only heard the beginning of.
To my extreme embarrassment, I discovered that for the first time since both podcasts [...]

In response to a subscriber who was concerned about using Transparency without causing output problems, this episode provides guidelines for best practices in documents that contain transparent objects. From layers to flattening to exporting, I lay out my four simple rules for avoiding the pitfalls of outputting transparency.
This episode is available in both the standard [...]

Collect your custom characters into an easy-to-use set by using the Glyphs palette and a little-known feature explained in this episode. Whether you need quick access to dingbats, accented characters, fractions or any other special glyphs, you can keep them available in a palette rather than scrolling through font menus and remembering obscure keystrokes.
This episode [...]

Last week, I spent six consecutive days immersed in InDesign and other Creative Suite applications (mostly Photoshop and Acrobat) in the beautiful city of Chicago at the back-to-back InDesign and Creative Suite Conferences. I’ve mentioned this event a lot in the podcast episodes leading up to it, so I figured a quick run-down of the [...]